Bald Facts From The Boston Hacker

A woman at Forest Hills tried his good nature even further than Nastase or the fan in Hartford. "She was sitting in the marquee and she called me over," Collins recalls. "She said she'd been wanting to meet me. Well, I smiled and put my hand out, thinking, you know, here was another grateful fan. She grabbed my arm and twisted it. She was strong, too. She tried to throw me down. She said, 'Don't ever call me hacker again.' "

To his credit, Collins ignored this bush-league advice. He considers himself, more or less correctly, the hackers' delegate in the Chamber of Aces. Primarily through his low-key, intelligent and witty telecasts on the public network, he has recruited a remarkably loyal audience of sore-armed weekend strokers. Tennis viewers, unlike fans of televised football or baseball, are likely to play the game themselves. Or as one letter writer informed Collins, "I hack tennis." This makes tennis fans at once more discerning and more grateful. "I want to congratulate all of you," one appreciative viewer wrote to his PBS station, "even Bud Collins." The fans seem to regard him as an old friend, soliciting his advice on their games and trading memories of great matches, and Collins reacts in kind. Some letter writers have suggested he acquire a toupee or at least retain an alert barber, but the majority overlook his baldness and agree with the female hacker who called him "a perfect mix between sensitivity and sarcasm."

"I like the idea of getting tennis away from the stuffed shirts who ran it for so long," says Collins. "That's what the hacker business is. Our viewers have the same agonies as the pros. I've seen Rod Laver butcher a simple volley and slap it against the back fence. A hacker isn't a klutz, it's anyone who's not a pro. I think we should organize. I want to get T shirts that say HOW—Hackers of the World."

Collins' TV style combines winsome self-deprecation with sporadic zingers directed at whatever tennis Establishment is handy, miscellaneous nonhackers, or his starchy lawyer-sidekick, Donald Dell, who plays beige to Collins' chartreuse. He reported on one recent show that the serve of French star Francoise Durr had been clocked at up to 8.3 mph, but that it was still "faster than mine." Italian tennis fans are so partisan, he observed, that "the only thing tougher than going against an Italian in Rome is trying to pick on Jimmy Connors with his mother watching." John Newcombe's travel schedule was so hectic, he said, that "he must have Patty Hearst's travel agent." When a prying camera at Wimbledon caught Britain's Princess Anne with a royal finger in her nose, Collins remarked that she had a terrific forehand.

He and Dell constantly trade amiable insults. When Dell heard Arthur Ashe cry "yours" to partner Dennis Ralston during a World Cup doubles match, he remarked, "That's your favorite word in doubles, Bud—yours." Collins took it on the rise. "I can say it in five or six languages," he retorted.

"Bud has an uncanny ability to sting without drawing blood," says a friend.

Collins has his own nicknames for most of the leading players. The relentless Ken Rosewall is the "Doomsday Stroking Machine." Right-thinking Stan Smith and his somewhat less devout partner, Bob Lutz, are known as "Straight Arrow and Bent Arrow." The gifted Bjorn Borg is "Teen Angel." Cannon-balling Vijay Amritraj of India is the "Madras Monsoon" while Nastase is the "Bucharest Buffoon." Nastase calls Collins the "Boston Buffoni"

But Collins is more than just another down-home face with a sense of humor. He is a sure-enough journalist in the TV booth and, more than that, an expert who knows everything that's happened in tennis since the first hacker double-faulted on the Newport green. His den, tucked under the eaves of his four-story town house on Beacon Hill, is a tennis archive cluttered with a century or so of annual tennis yearbooks, tennis magazines and such esoterica as Psych Yourself to Better Tennis by the inimitable Walter Luszki. His tennis yearbooks are so well thumbed they appear to have been nibbled upon by small furry creatures. Collins refers to himself as a "tennis degenerate," though he readily concedes that few degenerates have attained his level of depravity.

"I'm the maven of tennis," he says. "I do some things just for the sake of tennis history. I recently wrote a letter to the U.S. Tennis Association complaining that Billie Jean King wasn't ranked this year. They said she didn't play enough tournaments. I'm one of the few who know that Billie Jean is tied with Helen Wills and Mabel Mallory for most years as No. 1—seven. I'd like to see her get eight and be the alltime champ. But I sometimes think I'm the only one who cares."

On the tube, he emits his ticker tape of information with a refreshing absence of solemnity. "Sports is supposed to be fun, and the sun will still come up after somebody loses," he says. "I try to inform and entertain. Sometimes I show off, sure, but I like to have fun with it. I find out what I want to know about the players and I share that with the people. I think of myself as conversing with friends, and conversation should be both amusing and interesting. Everyone talks too much on TV, myself included, but I'm trying to keep it to a minimum. Tennis coverage can become even quieter as the public learns more about the sport."